TCD

Trinity College Dublin (TCD) is the leading university in Ireland, ranked 13th in Europe and 43rd in the World by The Times Higher Educational Supplement global rankings 2009. The Department of Computer Science pened in 1969 and consists of over 60 academic staff, 35 research staff and 180 postgraduate students, recently amalgamated within the School of Computer Science and Statistics. The School hosts the Grid-Ireland OpsCentre that manages the Irish grid on behalf of Grid-Ireland (the Irish NGI).

Relevant expertise / know-how: Grid-Ireland has always run an independent national grid, integrated with EGEE. Hence it has always run top-level national grid services, and also runs top-level international grid services for some international VOs. It has an integrated deployment architecture, with a core infrastructure of fully virtualised “grid gateways” in 17 academic institutions in Ireland, that employs fabric management tools to automate deployment of middleware to these gateways and central services. It has its own helpdesk and user technical support.
TCD were the first to deploy EGEE Grid infrastructure servers on virtual machines. It operates significant virtualised testbeds for middleware certification, e-Learning, and experimental development, and is also working on tools for improved management of virtualized testbeds. It has been working on interoperability since 2004, and also now on bridging to multiple clouds. It has in-depth expertise in middleware, and has long experience in testing, certification and deployment of grid services. It began a Grid Middleware Porting Activity in Oct-2003, drawing on prior experience in porting code to Linux, Windows, Solaris and AIX from 1995 onwards. As the coordinator of the multiplatform and porting support in EGEE-II/III, TCD has touched into many areas of the gLite (SA3/JRA1), VDT and ETICS software development, see: http://grid.ie/autobuild/. TCD holds an unusual position in dealing with EGEE SA3, JRA1 and ETICS, coordinating portability, multiplatform support, and development QA (especially standards compliance).